I often check the Newest Nodes to see if there are any unanswered / poorly answered questions that I could answer. However, since, for instance, the Questions section does not show the amount of first-level replies to the node, I cannot be sure this question has not already been answered multiple times.

Therefore I suggest having a configuration option that triggers this behaviour (e.g. a column saying "Replies" with a number in every row). If this already exists, I was unable to find it, and I apologize.

In any case, I do understand that this option might prevent people from reading recent nodes and perhaps sharing some of their insight that they've got, and that it might therefore not be a good thing to have.